Mirroring The PHP Website

If you would like to participate in the official PHP mirrors program,
please read and follow these instructions carefully. You should have
the consent of your hosting company (if you aren't a hosting company
yourself), and be prepared for some potentially significant bandwidth
usage. As of 25 September, 2013, the network of mirrors is averaging
251GB per day (about 7.52TB per month). At the time of the updating
of this page, this load was spread across 90 active mirrors, indicating
an overall average of 2.9GB per mirror. This can go up to 12GB per
day or more for busy mirrors, such as those in the US, UK, and India.
And immediately following new releases of PHP, the traffic spikes even
higher (as should be expected) due to a surge in the number of downloads.
Please be sure your server or hosting account is able to handle a minimum
of roughly 42 gigabytes of transfer each month without incurring any
additional costs or penalties, as the mirrors with the fewest requests
per month are still averaging this amount of bandwidth usage per month.
In the event that such action is taken against your account, remember:
it is your responsibility.

Official mirror program participants are required to use PHP 5.3.21 or
greater, but please note that we encourage maintainers to always use the
latest stable versions of actively-developed branches. Please note that
we do, somewhat regularly (about once per year) require existing
maintainers to upgrade their PHP versions to a new minimum, so always
being proactive in upgrades will ensure that your mirror remains in
compliance with the official mirrors program. Set it up as an Apache
module with the settings outlined below, or in
any other Apache connected way (CGI, FastCGI, etc), considering the
requested PHP settings outlined below in the Apache vhost instructions.
The size of the full website is approximately 4.7 gigabytes.

NOTE: Some of our maintainers prefer to use web servers other
than Apache, such as Nginx.
While this is permitted (as long as everything ultimately works as
directed), we do not officially support these setups at this time.
If you would like to learn how to set up an alternative environment,
feel free to post a question to current mirror maintainers on the
mailing list at php-mirrors@lists.php.net.

Applications to join the official mirror program are reviewed on a
case-by-case basis, but we will only approve those from ISPs and web
hosting providers; universities and state-recognized academic institutions;
PHP-centric web development firms; and PHP user groups and individual
enthusiasts. Under no circumstances will we even review applications from
marketing firms, website portals or directories, or anything of
questionable moral or legal standing. We also reserve the right, at our
discretion, and without warning, to refuse any application for any reason,
or to suspend or expell any active mirrors if it is discovered that any
information on the application was false or otherwise incorrect, or if
the mirrors fails to remain in compliance with the official mirrors program.

Please note that we are currently only accepting new applications for
countries in which we don't already have two official mirror presences.
For a list of active official mirrors, see mirrors.php.
Prior to attempting to set up an official mirror site, you are advised to contact php-mirrors@lists.php.net (a public
mailing list, archived in numerous places on the Internet) to inquire as to
whether or not your application may be accepted. We have found that this limit
serves our users well, so please do not ask to provide a third mirror for a country
that already has two. Please also be aware that the mirror is required to be
physically located in the country you would like to serve. If there are already
two mirrors in a country for which you would like to provide an official mirror,
you may add your information to the official waiting list, which can be found
here. If and when
a vacancy becomes available, we will go through the applications on the waiting
list before entertaining new public applications.

Get Files With Rsync

First, you need to have a rsync
installed. To better serve our official mirror providers and maintainers,
we switched to a geographically-decentralized distribution architecture. By
switching from a single United States-based master server to three Regional
Rsync Nodes (RRNs), we're able to reduce the amount of latency and time to
transfer data between an RRN and a mirror, serve more requests per hour
(allowing for a closer to real-time network update globally), and provide
redundancy in the event of an outage of a sync server.

To synchronize your server with the appropriate RRN, first view the coverage map
and identify which RRN your mirror should be using. Next, modify the
following code for use with your mirror. Replace YOUR_RRN_HOSTNAME
with your RRN's hostname as indicated by the coverage map and be sure to
change /your/local/path with the path to where your php.net
mirror will reside on the filesystem.

after "--delete-after" in the command line above (substituting your
prefered language code in place of 'en'). You can also exclude the
whole distributions directory (and the related extra folder) by replacing
"--exclude='distributions/manual/**'" with
"--exclude='distributions/**' --exclude='extra/**'".

Official PHP mirror sites should provide the exact content coming from our servers,
and must not be altered in any way unless explicitly stated in the mirroring
guidelines. Failing to do will result in immediate termination and permanent
expulsion of your participation in the program.

Add SQLite 3 Support

SQLite is an embedded
SQL database implementation that has very high performance for applications
with low write concurrency. PHP mirrors currently employ SQLite for URL
shortcut lookups, and it is a requirement of all official mirrors to have
it installed and available to PHP.

There are a couple of SQLite 3 implementations in PHP. One is via the
PDO extension by using the SQLite driver (pdo_sqlite, which is required).
The other is via the SQLite3 extension. These extensions are both compiled
into PHP by default. Note: Some Linux distributions disable many extensions
in their package systems, including SQLite. Please make sure you install the
"php5-sqlite" (or similar) package if using such a system.

Setup Apache VirtualHost

Make sure your web server is set up to serve .php files as PHP
parsed files. If it isn't, add the MIME type to your config.

Please make sure you have turned off output compression for binary files.

You should only start to set up an Apache VirtualHost for an official
mirror if you have contacted us first and received
the permanent names for your mirror. The names for all official PHP mirrors
are in the convention: ccx.php.net, where cc
stands for the 2-letter ISO country code of your mirror's location and
x is an incremental identifier for the mirrors of that country.
Do not assume that you know the code you will receive until your application
has been reviewed and approved, and do not submit an application saying, for
example, "We are applying to become DE1.PHP.NET." It's possible that the
mirror already exists, but is experiencing issues that have it temporarily
removed from active rotation, and delisted from the roster of mirrors. We do
not want anyone to waste their time only to have their application altered
or rejected. The mirrors should also listen for the cc.php.net
hostname, as we moved to providing a simple load-balancing solution:
round-robin DNS.
All mirrors are required to be configured for both CC and CCX, so any active
mirror can receive traffic for their respective cc.php.net
hostname, thus providing redundancy and improved uptime for visitors.

Before adding new official mirrors to our DNS, we require the maintainers
to set up the mirrors with an address we can use as a CNAME in the DNS.
This subdomain (the.cname.you.set.up.example.com in the above
example) will be checked by mirror admins before the mirror is added.
Therefore it is important that the mirror is capable of serving requests
for this name and the (www.)cc(x).php.net address provided by the
mirror administrators.

The hostname you provide to us must be a configured hostname to be entered
into our DNS as a CNAME, not an IP address to be used as an A record. Your
local DNS information may then translate into both IPv4 and IPv6, should
you so desire and have the capabilities, but may not exclude IPv4 from the
record until further notice.

When setting up the vhost, provide an asterisk, a hostname, or an IP
address in the VirtualHost container's header (depending on whether
you would like to make the vhost work for all IPs handled by Apache,
or just a specific hostname/IP address). Consult
the Apache
documentation for the differences of the two methods. It is very
important to use your ccx.php.net address as the ServerName, so
URL redirections will keep the requests in the php.net domain, ensuring
that the My PHP.net service will work. Failure to do so will also cause
your mirror to show up as an unofficial mirror, and to be removed from the
roster page.

Change the DocumentRoot setting as appropriate,
specify the mirror's preferred language, and provide settings according
to your stats setup, if your mirror is going to provide stats. For the
preferred language setting, choose one from those available as
manual translations. If you provide something else, your default
language will be English. After you restart Apache, your mirror
site should start working.

Setting Up Local Stats

Setup Regular Updates

You must also set up a cron job that periodically does an rsync to
refresh your web directory. We prefer that all mirrors update from
the appropriate RRN from the coverage map every five minutes, to
speed up the distribution of updates to the site and available packages.
Something like:

Remember to specify the same rsync parameters you used to get the
phpweb files as explained near the top of this page.
If you're unable to synchronize every five minutes, you may pick
your own update frequency, provided it does not exceed fifteen
minutes.

Sponsor Logo

We would like to thank you for providing a mirror, so
if you would like to display a logo on the mirror site promoting your
company, you are able to do so by following these steps:

Create a 120 x 60 pixel sized logo button.

Copy it to your /www/htdocs/phpweb/backend folder as mirror.gif, mirror.jpg or mirror.png.

Go visit your mirror URL (e.g. http://foo.php.net/mirror.php) and check if it is there.

The PHP Group and the Network Infrastructure Manager reserve the
right to refuse images based on content, but most things should be fine.

And finally, don't forget to put a nice little PHP logo somewhere
on your hosting company's site if possible. Grab one of the logos
from the logos download page, and
link it to your mirror. This shows the community that you are a
proud supporter of PHP and open source technology, and you will be
worshipped every hour, on the hour, in song and dance, by millions of
proboscis monkeys
the world over. Well, okay, perhaps not.... but folks will certainly
appreciate your generosity and support!

Mirror Setup Troubleshooting

The mirror troubleshooting guide
contains information about the common and potential problems discovered
when setting up and maintaining a PHP.net mirror. Included are links that
perform many of the tests executed by the automated mirror management tools.

Data Registered About Official Mirrors

Once you have done the above and your site appears to work, send a message
to php-mirrors@lists.php.net
with the following information, and appropriate steps will be taken to
integrate your mirror site:

Your country.

The ccx.php.net address you used to set up the mirror site, which
you obtained previously in a conversation with the mirror admins.

Your name and email address to be registered as the admin of the mirror.

A hostname that we can use as a CNAME for the country-code-based
name of the mirror (the.cname.you.set.up.example.com in the
above setup example). Using a name means you can move the mirror to
another IP address without coordinating with us at all (though, obviously,
it must still be in the country you intend to serve).

Whether or not you've installed local stats support on your mirror.

The name of the sponsor approved previously by mirror program staff.

The URL of the sponsor. This link is provided with the sponsor's name
at the bottom of pages, with the sponsor image on the front page and
in the mirror listing.

There is a mailing list named "php-mirrors" at
lists.php.net, to which you are required to subscribe.
This mailing list is very low-traffic and only used for communication
between mirror maintainers and php.net webmasters, and to provide
automatic information on mirror outages and other issues.

We also operate an EFNet channel, and encourage you to join us there.
If you are interested, please join us at #php.mirrors.
Many maintainers and staff members idle in the room around the clock,
and are available to address questions, concerns, or issues in
real-time (keeping in mind that the mailing list is the official
support channel, and this is just a convenient additional method of
communication between teams).

Thank you for your interest in providing a mirror! If you ever have any
questions or concerns, drop us a line at
php-mirrors@lists.php.net
--- we are here to help!